Osogbo and the Art of Heritage: Monuments, Deities, and Money

Peter Probst, professor of art and art history at Tufts University, published Osogbo and the Art of Heritage, Monuments, Deities, and Money with Indiana University Press in 2011, in the African Expressive Cultures series, an ethnographic and historical study of the Osogbo art movement and the Osun sacred grove in Nigeria, examining how the site's status as a living Yoruba religious centre and a UNESCO World Heritage listing, granted in 2005, sit in tension with each other. The book was reviewed in the Journal of African History and the Bulletin of SOAS, standard peer venues for African studies. Its strength is fieldwork spanning the movement's founders, the Austrian artist Susanne Wenger among them, and the site's own custodians. Its limit is that it centres the mid twentieth century Osogbo School's own account of the grove's revival, so a claim about the grove's precolonial religious history needs an independent archaeological or oral historical source as well.